[syhprum (OP)]

Many of the older correspondents may own much loved vintage scanners etc and would have found when trying to set them up on a new system they no longer work despite having the software that has worked fine for 30 years.
The reason for this is that the nice people at Redmond wishing us to use shiny new equipment no longer supply the feature NVDTM that enables equipment that uses 16 bit code on a 32 bit system to operate.
All is not lost the NVDTM feature can be downloaded from many sources and inserted into the system via DISM with instructions readily available how to do this after which everything works fine.

[chris]

You are so right. I've chucked away so many cherished peripherals over the years as they have been rendered - despite being fully functional, reliable and loved - obsolescent. It's almost like reinventing roads so only modern cars can drive on them. 

[syhprum (OP)]

Modern roads have been reinvented they have been made more narrow and ridiculously low speed limitits enforced so what you need in a modern car is lots of comfort and entertainment (but you dare not talk on the internet as you dawdle along).

[nicephotog]

There is some backward compatibility with x32 and x64 as can be understood in the recent MS windows OS and Linux OS.
Installing x64 kernel does not completely mean the OS will always use x64 but it may be possible to go back further to fat16 with a special handler app add in to the OS if there are any on offer.